Sunday, August 06, 2006

my cool mennonite grandma

Apparently I worried my grandma with my earlier post bemoaning the Floyd Landis scandal, because today I got this e-mail from her:
I considered calling you, but decided I could say it better in writing.

In church this morning I ran into Dr. Sam Yoder, prof. emeritus at GC who was an Amish kid who wanted an education and ended up with a phd and a reputation for scholarly research on the Amish. I told him you were having a hard time dealing with disappointment over the Landis affair. He said " When folks bring it up to me I tell them that the conservative Amish-Mennonites have a high level of testosterone. They usually have ten or twelve children. Landis's father says, If Floyd had stayed in Farmersville(?) married a good conservative girl and had a big family he wouldn't have to worry about testing high for testosterone." I like that way of looking at it; all humans are fallible and somtimes the best way to deal with a fellow human's downfall is to accept that everyone makes mistakes and the higher you reach the more glaring the fall.

To which I replied:
I'm not in the throes of despair over it; I was just commenting on the situation. Interesting insight, though. But it contradicts the only Mennonite joke I know: "What's the difference between a Mennonite man and a mouse? A mouse has hair on his chest."

Then, from her:
How do we know Adam was a Mennonite?


because only a Mennonite man would be more interested in an apple on a tree than the naked woman beside him.

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